In my games, like many I tend to expand my mining operations to haul (potentially) ridiculous amounts of ore to my base. This of course involves setting up lots of mining operations. Right now, what I usually do is plop down a blueprint for the train loading area, then stamp down a 4x2 miner blueprint all over the deposit, hook the output belts up to the loader and place the defensive perimeter around the entire mining site. Right now, that still involves quite a few manual steps so I'm thinking about ways to have more of this included in a single blueprint.

Options I've been thinking of:
- make a blueprint that contains a 6x6 or 8x8 grid of miners, complete with walls, loader and everything
- build a modular system

The complete blueprint is probably the simplest to just plop down as long as the size of the deposit fits within the grid, but it is of course also the least flexible (especially on my current map, where RSO has giving me a lot of clusters of smaller deposits relatively close to each other). The modular approach is more flexible, but also increases required fiddling (and more flexible automatically means more fiddling).

So I'm inviting everyone to share their methods and ideas for rapid deployment of their large scale mining operations

What i often end up doing is copy paste a previous outpost, when in a game with many generic outpost, i try to find on the map one that has the approximate same size/shape with miners on it and i just copy the whole thing including station miners and belts that connects them and sometimes defense all of that using the radar view.

The first few i do manually the tweaks, the more outpost you have, the easier it is to find a similar size/shaped one.

I don't often need defense though, i tend to only mine inside the wall, or just play without biters.

Unless i use robots mining, if so then i will try to make a tileable pattern to cover the ore patch, using rotation and CTRL-C CTRL-V, to cover the particular shape, then copy only the train stations. ( often doing the first CTRL-C from the map view from another outpost too )

My outpost building became much smoother after defining a proper (and simple) interface between the station and the miners. Since I don't use bots for outposts, it's just a specific number of belts, say 4 red belts. If you later switch to a higher throughput version, you need upgraded blueprints with more and express belts. I use 12 express belts in the final design.

This means that I use a station blue print that integrates well in my modular rail system, i.e. it can be "printed" "over" a straight section of the rail system. This blue print includes everything down to the "interface".
In a second step I print a very large standard miner blue print on the ore field that delivers the ore to the exact same number of belts as the interface. (It's easier to remove what was printed too much compared to the other way around.) In the same blue print book are blue prints for straight, corners (left and right) and crossings for the parallel belts that can be conveniently used to connect the two interfaces of the miner- and station- blue prints.

Add power and everything's done.

PS: I use power and armour to be able to command 500 construction bots. But I'm also an impatient person.
PPS: In order to fill 12 express belts it might be neccessary to use 2-3 ore fields. Hence, it makes sense to have a "merger" blue print as well. But all this is in between the two interfaces.

So I'm inviting everyone to share their methods and ideas for rapid deployment of their large scale mining operations

https://mods.factorio.com/mod/BigDrills -- one machine, one full belt of the appropriate tier. significantly easier, though they are vastly more polluting and power-hungry than the vanilla miners for covering the same area, or the same output rate. I'm fine with that trade-off.

What I do* is combine a number of blueprints that automate most of the chore of outpost construction while staying fully vanilla:

1. Use personal conbots to create a small starter outpost (station, radar, roboport, supply train unloading)
2. Setup train routes to/from the outpost, unless all outposts share a name.
3. (Remotely) Place blueprints for (a) ore loading station, (b) mining drills, and (c) ore loading into buffer chests. The supply train will keep coming until no more supplies are needed, so you don't need to be there for any of this.

I dislike bot mining since you need thousands if the ore patch gets big, and I dislike balancers and belt customizing, so I do a hybrid where blue belts move ore towards the station, and bots do the last mile to the buffer chests with built-in balancing.

That looks like something someone should put into a mod directly. And then why not simply click on the ore with a tool to generate the blueprint. The LUA code can figure out the size of the ore patch itself.